Memorandum of Understanding (MOU): UEH and 10 UC Campuses

History of the UC Haiti Initiative (UCHI)

The earthquake that devastated Haiti on January of 2010 took over 250,000 lives, including over 18,000 highly skilled professionals. In response, a group of University of California students began constructing a unique vision for effective assistance; a vision anchored to the recognition that as global citizens we can honor our shared humanity by organizing the collective resources of one of the world's premier public university systems into long-term partnerships that serve our Haitian counterparts' visions for their future. Out of this moral imperative, a collection of UC students and faculty formally established the University of California Initiative in the fall of 2010.

To date, UCHI has coordinated an unprecedented movement garnering widespread student, faculty, and administrative support across all 10 UC campuses.

With established UCHI student chapters on each campus, UCHI can assist their Haitian peers in a variety of critically important sectors. UCHI is partnering with Haiti’s largest public institution of higher learning, the Universite d’Etat d’Haiti (UEH), which lost hundreds of lives and 90% of its physical infrastructure. Through its partnership with UEH, and by virtue of the strong, cross-UC student and faculty engagement, UCHI is effectively leveraging UC resources via sustainable, peer-to-peer capacity building collaborations with UEH partners.

International governments and organizations are not prioritizing higher education in their “plans” for Haitian reconstruction. It is UCHI's belief that higher education and training the country’s future leaders is critical to Haiti’s long term success.

UCHI believes that partnering directly with UEH students, alumni, faculty, and administration is one of the most promising poverty alleviation and long-term human and community development strategies.

Guiding Principles

• Peer-to-peer curriculum development, capacity building, experiential learning, and field work.
• Community-based teaching preparation requires University leaders and faculty to bring coherence to programs, foster an appreciation of the power of cooperative effort and encourage dialogue that promotes the continual rejuvenation of sustainable programs in Haiti. 
• Constructive education encourages engaged, inquiry-oriented learning enabled by formal and informal assessments of peer-to-peer student learning, and experience and instruction designed in response to those assessments. 
• Cultural sensitivity to applied development work and University-level teaching.
• Curricular integration adds to the Haitian and American student experience by multi-disciplinary, multi-level coordination. 
• Critical reflection uses manifold formal and informal methods to review programs in order to strengthen teaching and learning, improve efficacy, and maintain the community as having the main stake.